humanities computing and the internet

Each month, the MediaCommons Field Guide hosts a different conversation in Media Studies, Digital Humanities, and Culture Studies asking contributors to connect their interests or research to a core conceptual question.

We are seeking contributors to shape diverse and intriguing conversations for our May 2019 issue, A Digital Space to Call Home, asking broadly:

How does homelessness and transience translate in digital spaces?

The responses we hope to compile in this issue can (but need not exclusively) address:

Algorithms are integral to a digital, networked, automated society. Thrown into the public spotlight by a certain high profile search engine, algorithms are increasingly recognised to exercise agency in practices such as governance, surveillance, online personalisation, medicine, design, high frequency trading, credit scoring and plagiarism. Computational machines make decisions about things, people, places and experiences, and humans learn to address algorithms.

Current debates about digital technology are caught in a death spiral of gloom, doom and anxiety. After a long period of optimism that accompanied the explosion of social media and assumptions of their democratic potential, today’s discourse is dominated by fear. Fear about the unchecked power of digital monopolies like Facebook, Google and Amazon; about the (ab)use of social media by far right political movements; about the psychopathologies, risks and trade-offs associated with constant and unyielding connectivity; fears about the radical surveillance enabled by the digital.

This issue of On_Culture aims to explore the concept of distribution across disciplines, opening the scope from media studies and global history to the study of culture at large. By combining it with broader issues such as agency, digitality, or knowledge production, the issue will seek to capture distribution in its multiplicity of (political) implications, contexts, infrastructures, and applications.

Call for Papers for a proposed special session at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention on January 9-12, 2020, in Seattle, Washington. This collaborative panel is jointly sponsored by the Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum and the Screen Arts and Culture Forum.

Comics and graphic narratives have long explored the nonhuman as allegorical representatives of the human experience. This panel examines the difference medium makes in adapting comics and graphic narratives for the screen, and how transmedia narratives of the nonhuman represent/challenge our understanding of humanity, for example: